[1640 - 1807] House of Braganza and the Restoration

On a cold December morning in 1640, the city of Lisbon held its breath. For sixty long years, the crown of Portugal had rested on a Spanish head, a period known as the Iberian Union. The once-mighty Portuguese Empire, a pioneer of global exploration, was now seeing its overseas territories neglected or lost to rivals like the Dutch. National pride festered like a wound. In the shadows, a group of forty nobles plotted a desperate gamble. Their target was Miguel de Vasconcelos, the hated Secretary of State for the Spanish Habsburg king, a man who embodied foreign rule from his office in the royal palace. The conspirators stormed the palace. Shots rang out. Vasconcelos was found hiding in a cupboard, unceremoniously killed, and his body thrown from a window to the roaring crowd below. The coup was swift, brutal, and successful. But a coup is one thing; founding a new dynasty is another. The throne was offered to the most powerful noble in the land, a man who had cautiously kept his distance from the plot: João, the Duke of Braganza. He hesitated. The risk was immense; Spain was a military titan, and failure meant a traitor’s death. It was his wife, Luisa de Guzmán, a woman of sharp Spanish noble blood but even sharper political instinct, who reputedly sealed his decision. "Better to be a queen for a day," she told him, "than a duchess for a lifetime." And so, as King John IV, he accepted the crown, inaugurating the House of Braganza. The first decades were a relentless struggle. The Portuguese Restoration War dragged on for 28 years, a bloody fight for survival against a furious Spain that refused to recognize its loss. Portugal had to reassert itself, not just in Europe, but across its sprawling, fractured empire, from Brazil to Angola to Goa. Then, as the 17th century gave way to the 18th, the struggle gave way to a dazzling, almost blinding, light: the glint of gold. Deep in the interior of its vast Brazilian colony, staggering discoveries were made. First, a gold rush of epic proportions in the Minas Gerais region, followed by the discovery of massive diamond deposits. The wealth that flooded into the royal coffers in Lisbon was almost unimaginable. Between 1700 and 1800, an estimated 1,000 tons of gold and 3 million carats of diamonds flowed from Brazil to Lisbon, a transfer of wealth that reshaped the kingdom. This golden age found its ultimate expression in the reign of King John V, a monarch who styled himself after France’s Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’. John V ruled as an absolute monarch, his power unquestioned and his treasury seemingly bottomless. He embarked on a building spree of breathtaking ambition, funded entirely by Brazilian riches. His masterpiece was the Palace-Convent of Mafra, a colossal monument to piety and power. It was a palace, a basilica, a convent for 300 friars, and a library, all in one limestone behemoth. With over 1,200 rooms, 4,700 doors and windows, and a set of 98 bells so enormous their ringing could be heard for miles, Mafra was not just a building; it was a statement. It declared that Portugal was once again a major European power, its king a peer of emperors. The court became a theater of opulence. Nobles, draped in French-style silks, velvets, and elaborate powdered wigs, jostled for royal favor. The Church, a primary beneficiary of the king’s largesse, was gilded in gold leaf, its ceremonies lavish, its power immense. Yet beneath this shimmering surface, a different reality existed. The vast majority of Portugal’s population, around 2 million people, saw little of this wealth. Peasants worked the land of the nobility and the church, their lives dictated by the harvest and the liturgical calendar. In the cities, a small class of merchants and artisans existed, but society was overwhelmingly stratified: a tiny, fantastically wealthy elite at the top, and a vast, impoverished populace at the bottom. Then, the world broke. On the morning of November 1st, 1755, All Saints' Day, one of the most sacred dates in the Catholic calendar, Lisbon was packed. The city’s great churches were filled with the faithful. At around 9:40 AM, the earth did not just tremble; it roared. A catastrophic earthquake, now estimated at a magnitude of 8.5 or higher, shook the city for several agonizing minutes. Stone groaned and shattered. The great naves of the cathedrals, filled with worshippers, collapsed inward, crushing thousands. Survivors who fled to the open space of the waterfront looked on in horror as the sea receded, only to return minutes later as a monstrous tsunami, a wall of water that swept through the lower city, drowning thousands more. As if that weren't enough, the thousands of candles lit for the holy day in homes and churches toppled over, sparking fires that raged for days, consuming what the quake and the wave had spared. In a few hours, the glittering heart of the Portuguese empire was reduced to rubble and ash. Up to 60,000 people were dead. The king, Joseph I, was so terrified he refused to ever sleep within stone walls again, living out his days in a complex of wooden pavilions. The disaster triggered a crisis of faith across Europe. How could a benevolent God allow such a thing to happen, especially on a holy day, in such a devoutly Catholic city? Out of the chaos stepped one of the most formidable figures in Portuguese history: Sebastião de Melo, better known as the Marquis of Pombal. The king’s chief minister, Pombal was a man of the Enlightenment—pragmatic, ruthless, and brutally efficient. While others prayed or despaired, he took charge. His orders became legendary for their stark simplicity: "Bury the dead and feed the living." He prevented epidemics by quickly disposing of corpses, controlled prices to stop profiteering, and set up field hospitals. More importantly, Pombal saw the disaster as an opportunity. He would not rebuild the old, medieval Lisbon. He would build a new city for a new age. The ruins of the Baixa, the downtown area, were cleared to make way for the world’s first large-scale, earthquake-resistant construction. Wide, grid-like streets replaced the twisting medieval alleys, designed for sunlight, air circulation, and rapid access for emergency wagons. This new ‘Pombaline’ style was elegant but severe, a monument to rational planning over divine providence. Pombal used the crisis to consolidate power, crushing his political enemies, particularly the old nobility and the powerful Jesuit order, whom he expelled from Portugal and its empire in 1759. He reformed the economy, education, and government, dragging Portugal, kicking and screaming, into the modern era. But another, greater storm was gathering across Europe: the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. By 1807, Napoleon dominated the continent. He demanded that Portugal, Britain's oldest ally, close its ports to British ships and join his Continental System. The Prince Regent, Dom João, who ruled for his mentally unstable mother, Queen Maria I, was caught in an impossible position. To defy Napoleon was to invite invasion. To obey was to betray Portugal’s most vital trading partner. As French troops massed on the Spanish border, Dom João made a decision of breathtaking audacity, one without precedent in European history. He would not fight. He would not surrender. He would flee. On November 29, 1807, a vast flotilla of ships set sail from the port of Lisbon. Onboard was the entire Portuguese royal court: the Prince Regent, the mad Queen, the state treasury, the royal archives, and some 15,000 nobles, servants, and officials. As the citizens of Lisbon watched from the shore, many of them weeping, the sails of their monarchy disappeared over the horizon. The court was abandoning Europe, relocating the seat of the Portuguese Empire thousands of miles away to its colony, Brazil, leaving the homeland to face the armies of Napoleon alone. The kingdom was now an ocean away from the king.